Esmeray Özadikti

Esmeray Özadikti — Biography

Esmeray Özadikti is a theatre actress, columnist and LGBT rights activist, and a trans woman. Her one-person show Cadının Bohçası, drawn from her own experiences, helped make trans women visible on stage and in public life in Turkey; in the 2023 general election she stood as a Workers' Party of Turkey candidate for Istanbul's 2nd district.

She was born in 1973 in the Digor district of Kars and moved to Istanbul at the age of 15. In 1996 she joined Pınar Selek's street-theatre workshop with street children and trans women, and from around 1999-2000 she took theatre, Turkish and Kurdish lessons at the Mesopotamia Cultural Center. She took part in founding the women's cooperative Amargi and chaired it for three years, and at Tiyatro Amargi she both directed and performed in Yazmadan Dökülenler, the story of 13 women who migrated to a big city.

From 2007 she turned to solo shows. Cadının Bohçası follows a trans woman's journey from Kars to Istanbul; its sequel Yırtık Bohça put on stage the discrimination faced by people of different sexual identities. In 2009 she performed two versions of a short play by Dario Fo, and in 2013 she created Kestirmeden Hikayeler, about her own transition. Her Taraf newspaper column and her Özgür Radyo programme carried the same title, Cadının Bohçası. In October 2013 she was elected to the party assembly at the extraordinary congress of the Peoples' Democratic Party.